A Cognitive Semantic And Syntactic Study Of Basic Color Words In Chinese

Color words are a significant component part of vocabulary in Chinese, and are important topics of study from cognitive perspective. Previous studies on color words mainly focus on the semantic part. This thesis makes a cognitive semantic and syntactic study of Chinese basic color words mainly on conceptual metaphor theory, conceptual metonymy theory and construction grammar theory. What have done are mainly from the following aspects: basic meanings and semantic extensions of basic color words in Chinese, cognitive mechanisms in their semantic extensions, predicate structures of Chinese basic color words and the relationship between semantics and syntactic structures of basic color words. All corpus in thesis are from CCL. The findings are as follows:In terms of cognitive semantic research on basic color words in Chinese, for the similarities, these color words share some common semantic domains: color domain, vision domain, emotion domain. For all basic color words, both cognitive metaphor and metonymy mechanisms contribute to their semantic extensions. As for the differences, the range rank of the semantic domains of five Chinese basic color words is: “bai”> “hei” >”hong”> “huang” >”lv”. Also, the extended meaning of basic color words in same semantic domain is different.In terms of cognitive syntactic research on basic color words in Chinese, the predicate structures of these color words are studied in this thesis because being predicate is the most particular features for Chinese color adjective words. There exist many constructions used in predicate, but “NP+A” and “NP +(Aux) + A +(Aux)” are the shared structures of all the basic color words in Chinese. For semantics related to syntax predicate structures of basic color words in Chinese, all basic color words in this thesis have the features [+permanent], [+temporary], [+changeable]. But the presentation of realizing semantics related to syntax is different. As for the relationship between semantics and syntactic structures of basic color words in Chinese, we can conclude that semantic features can be mapped from syntactic structures. Based on construction grammar, the compatibility between the participant roles of the verb and the argument roles of the construction is analyzed by diagram, which reveals the way of semantic and syntactic relation of basic color words in Chinese.The study made in this thesis can enrich the theories in cognitive linguistics and be of reference value to people using Chinese basic color words.